footnote tag

Here's something I've been thinking about which might
be pretty easy to implement. How about a method for
automatically generating nice, neat, numbered
footnotes? You could embed something like [[note: the
North American Land Giraffe is an example of a species
so rare no members have ever existed.]] into the text
of an article, and then when it gets converted to HTML
for display the tag gets replaced with a number that's
linked to an anchor down at the bottom of the page with
the text of the note in it. Wikipedia's hyperlinks
between articles make footnotes not as important as
they would be for a paper encyclopedia, but there are
still situations where they're very handy; annotating
tables of data, for example, where there isn't room to
include the text and it doesn't warrant a whole
separate article. You could even get fancy and have
[[note:]] tags within tables get placed immediately
below the table itself, associating them more directly
with the table.

I see footnotes used occasionally in Wikipedia articles
anyway, and this way they'd be much easier to maintain.